


every beautiful thing

by Sasskarian



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Children, F/M, Ghosts, Goodbyes, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Post-Canon, Remarriage, Widowed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-10 05:33:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14730902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sasskarian/pseuds/Sasskarian
Summary: They’ve always fascinated me,Thomas had said of ghosts, smiling down at her book.You see, where I come from, ghosts are not to be taken lightly.Sometimes, Edith wishes she’d listened to him. She no longer takes ghosts lightly, either.





	every beautiful thing

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so i know _canonically,_ thomas moves on— but would i be the angst queen my friends ~~hate~~ love me for if i let canon have its way? 
> 
>  
> 
> _...nah_

Fandom: Crimson Peak (2015)  
TWs: murder (canon); dubcon (canon); referenced incest (canon); poison (canon); ghosts (canon); death; children; non-graphic birth; blood  
Recommended Listening: [[x](https://youtu.be/pUlX8ltm_JU)] 

***

 _Your heart fits like a key into the lock on the wall_  
_I turn it over, I turn it over_  
_But I can't escape_  
_I loved and I loved and I lost you_

*** 

Lost Words prompts: 

Commendaces - funeral orations; prayers for the dead  
Nerterology - learning relating to the dead or the underworld  
 **Redamancy - the act of loving in return**  

*** 

 _I would prefer to be Mary Shelley. She died a widow._  

Despite a foolhardy counter, thrown in indifference and pride, Edith never thought she would be a widow. Despite her foolish quip so many years ago, she is no Mary Shelley. And despite moderate success as an author and teller of stories, the only thing she and Shelley have in common is a belief in a world outside of the everyday, and widowhood.

Some widows turn to cards, to drink, others to any variety of prescription oblivion. Many more turn to the occult, to séance and ritual, as a way to keep the tether of the past tight round their wrists. Edith has no such need; life after death is as real and near as the moonlight beaming across her floor. Proof of the supernatural is but a few inches in front of her, cool and weightless and achingly familiar.

And encouraging her to move on.

“You told me that you loved me.” Edith can’t quite keep the hurt, or the accusation, out of her voice.

 _I do,_  he whispers, and the cool caress of his breath on her is as real as his cheek had been in her palm, stained with clay, and with blood, and with snow. Snow heralds nothing but pain in Edith’s world: first her mother’s funeral, smothered in fat white flakes wet on her lashes like tears, then her father’s. Smaller ones, then, rain slowly freezing and scattering on the ground; the ones that night at Allerdale were the smallest yet, more ice pellet than snow. Jagged, hateful things scraping at her with a cold that burned through skin and encased bone.

…God, how she has come to hate the snow.

“I wish we had left,” she murmurs through a yawn, head pillowed on her arm. Thomas lays beside her, and if she half-closes her eyes, the translucence fades from him and she can almost pretend he is here with her, where he belongs. “I wish that night in the depot had never ended.”

The memory is clear, bright as the sun and just as cherished: Firelight combing gilt through Thomas’ hair, every curl drenched in gold; his hands trembling at first, giddy with the rush of skin on skin, firming with encouragement. She remembers thinking,  _this is how marriage should feel,_  as he kissed smile after smile against her ankles, her wrists, any inch of her he could reach. Being pinned beneath him, those  _eyes_ locked on hers as he crawled up her body, exploring and adoring, drowning her in wonderment.

 _You woke me from that nightmare,_  he reminds her, hand trailing a hair above Edith’s arm, pulling her from the bitterness that swims in her blood. ( _You need a measure of bitterness not to be eaten,_  he had said, and the irony is, betrayal had been the best teacher.)

“Did I?” She smiles a bit, hand inching closer to him.

Thomas’ smile starts in his eyes, a slow, warm thing that spreads to his face and lights it up from within.  _Yes,_  he says.  _You taught me that to love is to be warm, and alive, and not that pitiful creature Lucille twisted me into._

Inwardly, Edith winces.

Lucille’s name is still as bitter as the woman’s poison, but beneath the knee-jerk of hatred, pity stirs deep in Edith’s breast. It had been slow to root there, frozen out first by the loss of Thomas, then by the outrage for her victims, and finally for her last crime. But rooted it had, in the end. Part of her wants to blame an unstable mind, warped like hot metal tempered wrong in the forge of their barren childhood, but every choice Lucille made was still a choice. It is a harsh pity, a sorrow sharp-edged and brutal; the sorrow for Thomas is a softer thing, blunted by the abuses she knows he suffered— though he is not blameless, and she never forgets that.

What she doesn’t say turns over in its grave, in the recesses of her mind, sighing out a truth they’d long ago discussed:  _How easy it is to justify our sins, my love. We are never our own villains._   

Perhaps he sees the change in her face, a memory of their first— and last— argument, because they are silent then, foreheads a mere breath apart. The moon outside rises higher as she breathes long, slow breaths, part of her searching for the scent of his cologne, the smell of machine oil and clay. Searching for him.

 _You really should accept Alan’s offer,_  Thomas says at last; his fingertips trace the pearlescent light dripping down her shoulder before moving to the thin scar on her cheek, eyes soft and sad on hers.  _He loves you dearly._

Edith sits up as Thomas fades from her side, only to reappear in front of the hearth. He paces, arms locked tight around each other, brows drawn together. She’s seen that look before, when he took the last cup of poisoned tea out of her hands. When he’d turned to her after saving Alan’s life— by stabbing him.

“I am not in love with Alan McMichael,” she protests, keeping her voice under control only by practice and will. Four steps, and she is in his wake, reaching for him with placation on her lips.  _You are not a monster. I was wrong_. “And it would be a disservice to give him half a bride.”

 _And I can give you no more than this!_  Thomas whirls to face her, leaning over the chaise and bracing his hands upon it.  _It is a cruel joke that we must endure so,_  he whispers, looking lost as she’s ever seen him.

The wound below his eye flickers in and out of existence, testament to the emotion coursing through him, but in moments, his gaze softens into that tender, unsure thing that is hers, and hers alone: those pale eyes, broken wide open and hers for the taking, as though she were the gift of his every breath, every beautiful thing rolled into one and somehow standing before him.

It is the last part of him, a small piece Lucille had been unable to taint— because it had taken Edith’s presence to coax it out of hiding.

“I don’t want more,” she whispers, wiping blindly at a tear. The lie is strong on her tongue, bitter like firethorn, all the more unpalatable because it mixes somewhere in her throat with truth. “I love  _you_.”

 _I need you to be happy, Edith,_ he says, and the words hit her heart like a slap.  _At least a little bit. And I think you must let go of me to be so._

Before she can say anything in her own defense, Thomas’ eyes fly open, and he disappears into the breeze-blown curtain. A slim, pale hand clasps the doorframe and, for a moment, Edith fears the returned spectre of her murdered mother-in-law, or perhaps Lucille— but the hand is followed by a small face, still round with youth, and the relief that floods her is dizzying.

“You should be in bed, my love,” Edith says, the stillness of the night and the sudden absence of Thomas crushing the words into a whisper. “Morning comes early.”

Nathaniel’s eyes glint in the darkness, and he carefully feels his way towards her, fingers trailing along the edges he can find. Part of her wants to rush to him, to help him, guide him as she had when he was a toddler, but at seven ( _and a half,_  he reminds her every chance he gets) years old, his pride has little room for coddling from his mother. Especially over his eyes.

 _Old soul eyes,_  Alan says, quiet and drawn after his checkups,  _and I should know._

He yawns, laying across the foot of her bed when he finds it and looking up at her. “I couldn’t sleep,” comes his reply, and she knows then that his eyes aren’t the only wound her past has left on him. Soon, there’ll be no denying the impossibilities of their lives: the Otherness hangs in the air, heavy and suffocating, keeping them both awake. One day, he will ask and Edith can either tell him the truth— or lie, and lose his trust forever. That her son seems sensitive to the hidden things of the world, as she had been, isn’t a surprise.

But she wishes it was: he is still too young, in her heart, to understand the world of spirits.

 _They’ve always fascinated me,_  Thomas had said of ghosts, smiling down at her book.  _You see, where I come from, ghosts are not to be taken lightly._

Sometimes, Edith wishes she’d listened to him. She no longer takes ghosts lightly, either.

***

Despite his proclamations of insomnia, Nathaniel is asleep within the hour, his silken black curls drifting through her fingers. He sleeps deeply, her son, and so doesn’t notice when her hand stills and a translucent one takes its place. Thomas’ fingertips fuzz when they touch Nathaniel’s hair, smoke against velvet that only briefly stirs a few locks. He looks at their son for a long moment, a small half-smile curving his lips.

“I miss you,” she whispers, fingers tingling with the need to feel his skin under hers; if she were to touch him, though, her hand might pass right through him, and that would almost be worse than not touching him at all. “So much, Thomas.”

 _And I, you_ , he answers.

If love could bring the dead back, Thomas would have been reborn ten times over, and her heart clenches at the thought and all the futility contained within. But it cannot, and he is not, and so she is alone with memories, and ghosts, and a son in whom the past echoes even now.

 _He’s as beautiful as you,_ Thomas whispers, his other hand reaching for her cheek. On her skin is nothing but a cool breeze, but if she concentrates, if her writer’s heart delves deep into memory, she can almost feel his touch as she had in life.  _My heart. My darling._

Dawn is near: fingers of crimson and violet lift the hem of the curtains to peek inside, and their one night will end soon.

 _Promise me you will think on it,_  he asks, looking at her. And Edith nods. To end their anniversary, however macabre, on a disagreement would be shameful, and so she closes her eyes against the burn of tears. The sharp, clean lines of his form are fuzzing, drifting away, and she knows from long experience that she will spend most of the next ten minutes with her gaze averted— watching him disappear is as painful as if she’s losing him all over again.

His long hands reach for her, cupping her face without touching, and even if she cannot feel him on her cheeks, he raises her eyes to his as surely as if she were captive.

 _You deserve more than this,_ Thomas murmurs, quiet, unyielding. A kiss ( _always intangible, always a yawning ache eating away more of her crumbling heart_ ) brushes her brow, and then her lips, and his last words before the dawn blooms bright and true, wiping out the spectres of the night are,  _Talk to McMichael. So much sunshine would be wasted as a martyr, my love._

***

The first time Thomas returned to her, she screamed.

Weak and feverish, half-delirious as the nurses huddled over the baby who should have been crying and wasn’t, he’d appeared an arm’s length away. There was no noise to herald his arrival, no unearthly chime or haunted screams— just a cold wind blown across her skin and then those eyes drinking her in as if she were the entire world, and all he could see.

Alan had moved from her side to wet the cloth for her brow again and in the doing, passed right through him; like morning fog burned away by the sun, Thomas drifted out of existence as silently as he’d arrived. To this day, Edith isn’t sure if it was the loss of touch from her surest friend, or the horror of her husband’s sad smile and bloody tear, or if it was even the silent interruption of his shade as Alan moved, but she remembers screaming his name, blinded by tears, and slipping into cool unconsciousness as her son began to cry at last.

For months, she and Alan put the experience down to the painkillers and strain of birth.

A little over a year later, on what would be confirmed as the anniversary of Thomas’ death, he returned again. Nathaniel slept fitfully in her arms, the moon a silent watcher over her shoulder as she rocked and cried— soundless tears, not unlike the ones she’d cried on the ship back to America, all emotion drained from her, all tension gone. Nothing but weariness, numbness, and an ache just below her breast, where her heart had been. He’d blown in on the winter wind, coalescing out of the snowflakes dancing through her open window— and never quite left again.

Fragile as can be, the bond between them and Thomas’ words from the hotel echo through her empty, cavernous chest:  _I cannot leave you here,_  he’d whispered, the first truth fallen from his lips.  _I feel as if a link exists between your heart and mine, and should that link be broken, either by distance or by time, then my heart would cease to beat and I would die._

The cruel joke is, he  _had_  died.

Murdered by his sister, his abuser, his once-love— and still some part of him lives on, tangled around her. He is only ever visible, communicative, on this night, and unlike the ghosts of Crimson Peak, she cannot force his visage to her eyes. Perhaps it is the anniversary, a day marked throughout time by such strong emotion as to provide… fuel, or whatever conditions spectres require to show themselves. Or it is punishment; whatever God she once believed in rolls His cruel dice and plays chess with two queens and has decided that her punishment for love, for leaving Thomas to deal with Lucille, is to be forever bound to him.

Marriage is ‘til death do us part— but not for the Sharpes, it seems.

Because Thomas is dead, and Edith yet draws breath, her heart beats, and still, he is here with her all the same. His presence is  _everywhere_ , no matter that he’d never set foot in her new home; she feels him all throughout the year sure the sun rises and the seasons change. No matter that he’d been in Buffalo but a few short weeks: it is here that he haunts her, however benignly. It is here that his whisper is in the waves on the waterfront, here that she feels the there-not-there touch on her cheek, drifting aimlessly between sleep and waking.

He is in the smallest of things, and though it no longer breaks her heart each day anew, Edith long ago accepted the inevitability of Thomas’ shade. The first years were… hard, a scant few hours insignificant against the gaping void in her chest. But with time, and tears, and no small number of nights spent with Nathaniel’s warm, solid weight a comfort in her arms and the soft sighs of the wind through her open windows, the ache faded.

And every year, like tides drawn to the shore, like moths to a flame ( _she tries not to picture those black moths, fluttering weak and dusty on the rotting walls_ ), this night ends with the stroke of midnight and a wisp of love so strong and forlorn, they cannot escape each other.

Is this to be their lives, then? She, always the widow, the pale slip with a black mourning ribbon around her arm; Nathaniel, with his father’s hair and her golden eyes, poisoned in her womb; Alan, the dearest friend, struggling with an unrequited love and competing against a dead man.

And Thomas, not here with her but never far enough away to move on.

***

There are times, moments of weakness over the next months, where Edith considers telling Alan about Thomas.

It would be a relief, to not be alone. To have someone to confide in again, as she had when they were children. Her memory whispers, conjures sun-drenched days when Sir Thomas Sharpe was nothing but a handsome foreigner, a mystery wrapped in soft murmurs and lonely eyes. Alan held silver-coated glass and spoke excitedly of ghosts, and what might keep them bound to the mortal world, and under the easy camaraderie lurks the validation she’d so desperately needed:  _you aren’t crazy. I believe in you._

_You’ve never spoken to me of these interests of yours, Alan._

How he’d looked at her, then. How he’d seen right through her.  _You’ve never given me the chance._

And she hadn’t.

It would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? Falling for the proverbial neighbor’s boy, the trusted confidante. Life is less convenient than that, and altogether too strange. And, she reasoned, they had never been anything but friends, warm and sure. But then she remembers the look in Alan’s eyes when he’d lifted her in the entrance hall of Allerdale, the set to his jaw telegraphing a fury held in check only by the knowledge that she was in no condition for him to right their wrongs. His options were to save Edith, or destroy the Sharpes.

And he’d chosen her.

Her father had said,  _he’s always been awfully fond of you._

As she had sat out in the drive, stiff-backed and eyes unseeing, a bloodstained cloth pressed to her mouth, it had been Alan who paced off the areas of the house she outlined. Alan who brought back a small box with pictures, trinkets, her father’s pen, carefully cleaned of blood. He’d been there through townspeople avoiding her eyes as they removed bodies, as the local police looped chains of steel and iron around the gates, as they murmured “Lady Sharpe” to her face and “naive victim” to her back. He’d stood beside her when she was presented with two urns, the curling Sharpe crest painted across, and again as she entombed Thomas and Lucille in a Cumberland mausoleum. And when she broke down and wept, signing papers to let Allerdale crumble into its mines, Alan’s arm had been around her shoulders, anchoring her.

 _Awfully fond_  didn’t do him justice.

Eight years ago, Edith might have convinced herself that she feels nothing for Alan. In the dark of the night, she is old enough now to see the frightened child she had been, that it had been fear that kept her from being true. She loved Alan— some part of her always has— but after losing her mother to cholera, and then household staff to various and sundry, and then friends through her own ineptitude… Edith had pushed Alan away before he had the chance to leave her, too. Thomas’ courting had slipped past her defenses, those formidable walls around her heart— to him, they simply hadn’t existed, even as he scaled them, while Alan waited patiently by the castle gate.

Was he still?

_Talk to McMichael._

Maybe she should. Maybe she will.

But there’s someone else to talk to first.

***

“Are you sure you’re okay with this, my darling?” Edith watches Nathaniel as he carefully dusts the snow from the carriage step for her. Flakes of it are caught in his curls, catching the sun’s rays and glinting like gems.

A mirror of her own brown-gold eyes turn and pins her with that too-old gaze, and the smile that breaks across his face is his father’s heart-stopping charm all over. “He isn’t Father,” he says, delicately kicking the mud from his shoe. “But I can love him all the same.”

Something like warning ripples along her spine, weaving ice between her ribs. “What do you mean?”

Despite the brightness of the day, her son’s face closes up— and that, too, is Thomas. But then he softens, and leans against her, his small fingers wrapping around hers as if sensing her need for comfort. A mother’s duty is protect her child but somehow, in the sudden chill his words hang over them, she knows  _he_  is trying to keep  _her_ safe.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you,” he begins. “But I have dreams sometimes. With Father.”

With. Not about.

_With._

“Are you sure they’re not just dreams?” is out of her mouth before she can stop it and oh,  _oh_ , how she wants to take them back; how many times did her own young self want to scream at the disbelievers, and the mockers, those who ground her pride and assurance under their heel until she recanted? Until she’d begun to doubt her own sanity. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, threading her fingers through his hair. “I didn’t mean that.”

“I know,” Nathaniel says, smiling up at her. “They’re nice dreams. Not very scary at all.”

 _But about what_ , she wonders.

It isn’t until they pull up to the building where Alan’s practice is that Nathaniel speaks again, giving her hand a brief squeeze. “We walk,” he says, and it takes Edith’s scattered, nervous mind a moment to find the thread of conversation. “And we talk.”

“Sometimes it’s snowing, but not usually.” His eyes look into the distance, as if piercing the veil between this world of theirs, and wherever his father is trapped. For the first time, Edith can finally appreciate just how nerve-wracking it is to have a child with one foot in another world, and she wonders at the steel threaded through her father’s spine as he stood alone against the onslaught of not being able to protect her from things going bump in the night. “He tells me stories.”

“What kind of stories, my love?” The footman is coming around, preparing the steps for them, and for a moment, she thinks she’s not going to get an answer.

Then Nathaniel squints up at her, something shadowed hovering in the curve of his lips. “About you. About his family.” As she watches, she can almost see him carefully weighing his words, picking through the truths Thomas shares to find something for her. “And about how it’s not safe for you at Crimson Peak.”

“Of course it’s not safe,” she says, pulling him close as the door opens. “The house is unstable.”

“No.” He resists the pull of her hand briefly, eyes staring at her as if trying to make her understand; through them, she can almost see Thomas’ focused gaze, that silent plea to put the pieces together and save them both. “Because she’s still there. That’s why he wants you safe.”

***

“The deterioration is slowing.” Alan’s broad shoulders look ridiculous, painted with the mid-morning sun and squared up against a desk two sizes too small. “Without knowing what poison she gave you, I can’t be much more specific, but his symptoms are stabilizing.”

Edith nods, a small weight dropping from her shoulders. Many a night passes with her reading texts as dusty as they are old, trying to wrap her mind around what damage was done to her son. Fear that his eyes would grow worse evermore, that Lucille’s brew would continue to touch him and perhaps in other ways— his heart, next, or his bones. Thomas’ loss is a gaping wound in her soul; losing Nathaniel, one of her last tangible links to her husband, to the nightmare of Allerdale Hall, would  _destroy_  her.

“He’ll wear corrective glasses for the rest of his life,” Alan continues softly, face still turned from her. “And I’ll need to monitor him routinely, but the damage is done. Over.”

“No,” she replies, soft as he. “The damage will never be over and done, Alan. All of us left bear scars, and always shall.”

Alan is silent for a moment. “‘Of all ghosts,” he begins, and it carries the air of an oft-said line, something he clings to in belief or defense. She can almost hear the quotation marks in the air and wonders if the quote is for her, or about her, “the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.’”

Finally he turns to her and, for one bare moment, it is as it was when they were children. The golden boy, blue eyes sparkling in the sun, nothing but honesty and affection between them— except it has not been that for a long, long time, has it? Alan left for his studies, and she left for Thomas, and now, now the pieces of what they could have been are at last colliding uneasily against one another.

 _You should take Alan’s offer,_  Thomas said. Except Edith isn’t sure Alan still even has an offer, or would take such damaged souls into his life.  _So much sunshine would be wasted as a martyr._

Sunshine. His word for her. The first year, that first anniversary, she and Thomas had talked the whole night through, hard words and bitter truths and acknowledgements.  _You were like sunshine, darling,_ he’d said, sitting so close their knees could have touched. Should have touched.  _A ray of light in a rotting house. I’d never met someone so… alive._

On the rare occasions that Edith is unflinchingly, brutally honest with herself, the part of her heart that belongs to Alan McMichael still shines in the corner. Most days, it’s an underwhelming, wan thing, a silver serving platter once grand in its days of service but since tarnished and covered with dust. But sometimes, sometimes the glory of it shimmers in the candlelight, whispering,  _notice me. Remember me. Live again._

…it terrifies her. Whirlwind romances have been part and parcel of her society since she was a child, reading fairy stories with princesses and shining knights at her mother’s knee, and yet, she’d never expected to live one. But Thomas Sharpe blew into her life like a hurricane, a natural phenomena wrapped up in once-plush velvet and the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. And just like a hurricane’s debris, she washed up on the shore afterward, battered and ragged, her own gaze forever waiting on the horizon for the next blow.

Never the same as she had been.

Except… she could allow herself to live again. To reclaim or, more likely, cut away the parts of her trapped in Allerdale Hall. Thomas clearly wishes her to, and her father hinted more than once he was open to the idea. She  _can_ … but does she  _want_  to? Living with the intangible, invisible weight of Thomas’ ghost, or not? Living past this trauma, right up to the border of her scars in defiance, acceptance? Which is worse? Is it still being unfaithful if it’s your own husband urging you to move on?

“Edith?”

Is she really doing this? Can she?

God help her, but she doesn’t know.

“Edith!”

Waves of shock roll through her, slow and lazy, as the ground tilts alarmingly under her. It is only the strength of Alan’s hands on her arms that keeps her feet half-planted and allows her to stumble her way to a chair. Distant, through the roaring in her ears, Alan calls for someone to take Nathaniel outside and she reaches for him, almost tumbling off the seat in her panic.

“Edith, good God, just sit still!”

Exasperation. Startled, she almost laughs. Of all the long days she and Alan spent together— as children, as friends, as confidantes. As survivors of this horror— she’d never heard or expected such sheer exasperation of him.

“It’s not as if she’s absconding with him,” he mutters, waving one finger in front of her right eye, then her left. “I’d trust Evelyn with my own children, not just my godson.”

His children. Edith wonders at that in a way she hasn’t before, hasn’t  _allowed_ herself to before, as Alan pokes and prods, tilting her head one way then the other. When his fingers rest against her wrist, the first clench of terror is past, and that subtle silver shine peeks out a little farther from the neglected corner of her heart. Alan’s brows furrow, a deep line ploughed between them, and before she can stop herself, her thumb is there, erasing it with a touch.

He freezes, closing his eyes and dropping her hand as if it scorched him.

“You are too kind to trifle with me, Edith,” he says unsteadily, turning to his desk for his prescription notes. He takes a deep breath and, “Your pulse is a little thready. Go home, drink plenty of water, and tomorrow, the druggist can mix these for you and Nathaniel.”

The prescription wavers in his hand, stretched behind him towards her and he only turns when she doesn’t take it.

Alan clears his throat, pulling at his collar, before he presses the note into her hand and steps away quickly. “I understand if my seeing Nathaniel is too distressing,” he says, looking anywhere but at her. “If you prefer, I can refer another ophthalmologist.”

His sweetness is warm, heavy on her heart. With every second, she contemplates how the ground between them has shifted, is still shifting, and sees all the time wasted and past. If she were to tell him that the wild, uncertain thoughts in her heart had been nurtured by Thomas, he would refuse. Dancing in a dead man’s shadow is nothing to aspire to, and even if he’s unaware of her continued hauntings, Nathaniel’s face might be enough ghost for him to deal with.

…and in truth, this seed was planted long ago by her father, and nurtured by Thomas since they returned to America. She has to remind herself of that if this is going to work, or the part of her shaped by social pressures will insist that Alan’s proposal is pity rather than love. She’d assumed so, when he first spoke of it: some overly masculine display of machismo, a need to take care of the hollow, wounded thing he’d brought back. But years passed and the truth revealed itself, that it was simply the course of a childhood love, and a shared trauma, and an ocean’s worth of emotions unnamed.

“I’m not distressed,” Edith whispers, hardly believing her own words. “Nor am I trifling with you, Alan.”

A vision of Thomas holding a taper candle flashes in her mind.  _The true test of the perfect waltz,_  he’d enraptured his audience,  _is for it to be so swift, so delicate, and so smooth…_

Alan looks at her, then, and when his eyes widen, when the question in them becomes almost palpable, she smiles. It’s a small thing— she can tell by the way her lips barely move— but it is genuine, and so very tired.

 _…that a candle flame will not be extinguished in the hand of the lead dancer. Now that requires,_  he’d smiled, coy, confident, breathtaking,  _the perfect partner._

Years have passed, full of ghosts ( _It’s not a ghost story, really; more… a story with a ghost in it_ ) and horrors ( _It is a monstrous love, and it makes monsters of us all_ ), of gifts and graces. Years have passed, and Thomas is right: it is time to live again.

Edith takes a breath to steel herself, and blows that candle out at last.

***

Wind flutters the curtains around Edith, the cold cutting right through her night rail as she swears. Alan grumbles, tucking the covers up over his nose, and she watches with a fond smile until his breathing evens back out. The clock downstairs in the foyer announces midnight with soft chimes, and she lays her head on her knees, waiting.

Her mind already fears the truth, but her heart refuses to accept it just yet. The chorus of  _just a little longer_  is seductive, promising in this liminal darkness between midnight and dawn.

Shivering, she pulls a blanket tighter around her shoulders, making sure that Thomas’ monogrammed ring is on its chain around her neck where it should be. Nathaniel will inherit the ring from her when he comes of age, a small token of all that should have been his, but for now, its weight and warmth is a comfort to her. Her finger hooks through it, restless.

One in the morning comes as she plays with it, listening to the soft clink of the gold on its chain.

Two comes as she stares at her hands. The dismissal her father delivered to Thomas at his presentation is as clear in her memory as if they were standing before her again:  _My hands. Feel them. Rough. The reflection of who I am._ She snorts softly, thinking that if hands proclaimed who someone was, she was in a world of trouble. For a man like Carter Everett Cushing, such a view is acceptable; perhaps not so much for a Lady who signed away her duties and remarried.

( _My hands are getting rough._ Thomas smiles in her memory, torn somewhere between self-hatred and love as she bandages his burn.  _Your father would be pleased._ )

Scar tissue circles her left ring finger in a thick band, shiny in the moonlight. In ripping the Sharpe ring from her hand, Lucille had given her another, one that will truly last a lifetime. On her right hand glints a thin, gold wedding band, as warm and real as the ring hanging round her throat. Despite the occasional titters and pitying looks she expected, there aren’t many remarks about her choice to wear Alan’s ring on her right hand; she is a widow, after all, and everyone in their social circle is well aware.

( _With this ring, I thee wed._ Alan’s hands trembled, his eyes searching her face, waiting for her to change her mind. She didn’t.)

Three o’clock comes with Edith’s eyes fixed on the moon. It’s always full this night. She can’t remember a single anniversary where the moon has been anything but full or nearly so. Alan murmurs her name in his sleep, a soft thread tying her to the new life they’re building. Guilt burns in her throat, bitter and thorny, but something— in the air, perhaps, or lingering in the back of her mind— keeps her seated on the cold wood, the open curtains tickling her toes. Down the hall, a flicker of light comes from under Nathaniel’s door and, briefly, she wonders if he’s waiting, too.

 _He isn’t coming,_  she chides herself.  _He said to let him go._

And she’s trying. Now that the fear is past, Edith is honest with herself. The love bearing Alan’s name is warm, slow and steady like honey drizzling from a spoon. No end or beginning, really, just a constant flow keeping her heart from drowning. It is… she searches for a word that doesn’t demean what they’re building, and finally settles on comfortable. Not settling, not second-best. But warm, a buffer against the storms they’ve weathered, like a favorite sweater.

Alan is  _comfortable_. 

Like her hands, similar but mismatched, so are her loves: Where Alan is strong and patient, Thomas had been quick. Clever and sharp like his name, and so lost compared to Alan’s quiet confidence. If she stretches out the metaphorical fingers of her writing, it is the difference between a hearth and a wildfire. Warming and consuming, controlled and intense. They are both fire, they both have her love, but… in different degrees.

 _Edith_.

Startled, she looks up, still playing with Thomas’ ring.

She thought… had she heard…?

The clock strikes four and a violet-red haze slides over to kiss the hills behind their home. With a sigh, the light under Nathaniel’s door finally goes out and, as she looks out at the coming dawn, she can almost see a thin, lone figure in the fog, hand raised in parting.

_Edith, my darling._

For the barest instant, there is a brush of lips across hers, the scent of clay and oil and moss on the wind. Cool fingers trail down her arms, lingering at the two bands before vanishing. A sigh shivers across her ear as arms circle her shoulders from behind, solid as anything she’s ever felt, and then she knows.

Thomas’ nose presses gently against her neck as the first tear comes rolling down her cheek, silent in the stillness. Words are impossible to call on, incapable of conveying the exchange between their hearts. So entranced by the feel (finally,  _finally_ ) of Thomas is she, Edith doesn’t notice Nathaniel until he touches her, lays his small hand over hers entwined with Thomas’. He smiles at his father, a soft, shy thing, and leans his cheek into the palm Thomas extends.

“This is goodbye, isn’t it?” she asks, leaning against the now-solid chest of her dead husband. “Really.”

 _Yes, my heart,_  Thomas replies, pressing a gentle kiss below her ear.  _You don’t need me anymore._

“I will always need you,” Edith whispers, watching in exhaustion as the sun creeps ever closer. Inevitable, unstoppable. Just like this. “Nathaniel will always need you.”

Thomas laughs, a quiet delight washing through mother and son both, and she turns to face him.  _My Edith,_  he says, joy glowing in his eyes as he brushes the backs of his fingers down her cheek,  _stubborn to the bone._

He kisses her one last time, the taste of his last breath sweet in her mouth, before he whispers something in Nathaniel’s ear.

And then he is gone. Without fanfare, without sound or breeze, as silently and suddenly as he’d first come to her, he is gone.

Her son climbs up onto the windowsill with her, stretching out his small feet until they rest between hers. In the dark, he looks so much like his father it makes her heart ache— but it is the ache of an old scar, a wound healing so slowly she hadn’t noticed.

“He loves us very much,” Nathaniel says into the stillness, sliding the words into the gap between them without a ripple. His tact and way with words is impressive, or would be, if it didn’t feel like Thomas’ clay excavator was finally working, busily mining away his presence. “We’ll always have that.”

Edith nods, throat too thick to speak. The words are inadequate, at best, a candle against the sudden emptiness in the air. But after several minutes of trying to swallow down what feels like her heart, the pressure begins to ease, and she wipes her stinging eyes.

“What did he say?” she asks, the sound barely audible. “If you want to tell me.”

Nathaniel is quiet, the touch of dawn gentle on his face. Pink streaks his jawline, while orange rests easy on his brow. Finally, he links his hand with hers and smiles. Like the dawn, it’s soft and easy, full of comfort and understanding that should have been too old for him but somehow fit. She once told Thomas, her fingers ghosting over his brow, that the Sharpes were born to be old before their time— her son is no exception, it seems, and her only desire is to make it as slow as possible.

“He said he’ll be waiting for us.” Nathaniel looks over his shoulder at Alan, still sleeping; the way his mouth softens as he looks at his second father almost breaks her heart all over again, love swelling to fill her chest. “All of us.” 


End file.
